TJ Rinomato and the education of a late-starting rookie

In 2019, the year he turned 50, TJ Rinomato acquired a title that rarely appears on an experienced executive’s business card: rookie. He entered the NASCAR Pinty’s Series with a working life in construction and real estate behind him. By the end of the season, he had won Rookie of the Year. A family name could introduce him around a building site. On a racetrack, he had to introduce himself again.

It is a pleasing complication in a career that could otherwise be described in familiar terms. Rinomato is the CEO and a co-founder of Rinomato Group of Companies, the Ontario family enterprise whose interests include homes, industrial property and construction. He also has an executive-producer credit on a feature film. His biography has room for both a development announcement and a stock-car results sheet.

The rookie chapter gives the rest of that biography a useful perspective. Experience is specific. Knowing how to assemble a property deal does not settle the question of how to place a car through a corner. A new setting asks different things of the person in charge, including the willingness to learn from people who have been doing it longer.

A rookie with a working life behind him

Rinomato’s first season included an uncomfortable appearance in someone else’s race story. At Trois-Rivières in August 2019, Alex Tagliani was leading late in the race when Rinomato’s number 02 car spun. Tagliani went around the outside to avoid it. Louis-Philippe Dumoulin took the inside route and passed him, going on to win.

The incident belongs in the story alongside the rookie award. Racing produces a public account of the awkward moments as well as the satisfying ones. There is no communications department between a spinning car and the drivers coming towards it. A beginner’s education can become part of somebody else’s afternoon.

Two years later, a more encouraging entry appeared in the results. At Delaware Speedway in September 2021, he finished twelfth in the first of the two Sunday races. In the second, he started seventeenth and finished ninth. It was his first top-ten finish in the series.

Ninth has a modest ring to it until you put it beside seventeenth. Eight places gained tell a more exact story than a general declaration of progress. The result also improved on the personal best he had set earlier that day. For a driver still building experience, the middle of a results table can contain an occasion worth remembering.

Three businesses, one family

The family construction story began before TJ’s own career. His father, Tony Sr., arrived from Italy in 1957 at sixteen. He learned the drywall trade and founded Torino Drywall seven years later. The family’s subsequent purchases of farmland led into residential and industrial development, with Country Homes and Tonlu Properties becoming the other foundations of the business.

TJ, his brother Ernie and his sister Elem worked within that family enterprise. In 2017, the family created Rinomato Group of Companies to bring its interests together. The group name gave a common identity to businesses whose work already fitted together: acquiring property, building it and looking after it.

Those are related tasks, but they are separate responsibilities. A site must become a project; a project must become a usable building. After construction comes the less ceremonial work of operation. A family business with interests across those stages has a reason to think beyond the day the keys change hands.

Today, Torino’s work includes residential, commercial, industrial and retail construction. Country Homes builds communities in Ontario. Rinomato Construction adds planning, design and construction services. The names describe different parts of a building’s journey, rather than a collection assembled solely because the businesses happen to share a surname.

For TJ, this is the working background to the racing chapter. He came to the starting grid from an enterprise where a finished result depends on successive contributions. The person whose name is most visible cannot perform every job. Buildings make that obvious, even when the ribbon-cutting photograph does not.

A team is more than its driver

In March 2021, Rinomato and Mark Dilley joined Wight Motorsports for the coming season. The announcement brought them into an operation with other drivers and a team preparing cars, transport and testing. It placed Rinomato’s next racing chapter within a larger organisation, with the practical demands that come before anyone can race.

That same month, another announcement showed him helping to create an opportunity for somebody younger. RGC Sports backed Treyten Lapcevich’s first full NASCAR Pinty’s season with 22 Racing, alongside Qwick Wick. The support followed RGC’s involvement with Lapcevich’s Pro Late Model and iRacing programmes.

Rinomato’s place in that arrangement was broader than his own seat in a car. Along with Dilley, he was part of an effort to help Lapcevich move into the series. The people involved included drivers with experience to share and a team with cars to prepare. A promising driver still needs a programme capable of putting him on the grid.

“We can’t wait to get to the race track this May”

TJ Rinomato, announcing RGC Sports’ 2021 plans

The enthusiasm is direct, with none of the elaborate vocabulary that sometimes attends a sponsorship announcement. He wanted to get to the track. The arrangement also explains why racing sits within the group’s business interests: it brings together participation, corporate partnerships and support for other competitors.

By the 2022 season, NASCAR listed him returning to Wight Motorsports. The rookie had become a returning driver. It is a small change in wording, earned through the rather less small task of continuing to turn up.

Another kind of opening night

There is a photograph from January 26, 2019 that offers a different setting altogether. Rinomato stands between Eddy Moretti and Michael DiVerdi at the Sundance premiere of The Report in Park City, Utah. All three are smiling. For once, the work clothes are suits and the background carries a film festival’s name.

Rinomato is credited as an executive producer on the film, written and directed by Scott Z. Burns. Its production credits also include Steven Soderbergh and Jennifer Fox among the producers. The credit gives his move into entertainment a concrete form: a completed film with his name in the list of people behind it.

He has described a supplier’s introduction to Moretti as the beginning of his involvement in Unbranded Pictures. The route is an ordinary business connection leading to an unfamiliar industry. Introductions can remain introductions. This one became a project, and then an opening night.

The photograph provides a useful counterpoint to the racing image. In one, his name belongs to the driver of a numbered car. In the other, it belongs within a long production credit. Both settings require colleagues with specialised jobs. Neither would amount to much as a solo undertaking.

Buildings with a second shift

The property work continued alongside these other chapters. At a May 2023 announcement in Barrie, Rinomato discussed Bayview Point, an industrial and commercial project near Big Bay Point Road. He connected demand for employment space with the city’s growing supply of housing, and pointed to the cost of land farther south.

“The cost of land south of Highway 7 has become ridiculous”

TJ Rinomato, Barrie development announcement, May 2023

The local case for the project concerned jobs and commuting. Housing growth creates places to live; employment land creates places to work. Bringing the two closer together changes the daily journey between them. The announcement’s anticipated jobs were projections, with buildings and tenants still to come.

The group’s property interests extend into management as well as development. Its affiliates manage more than two million square feet of company-owned space across several uses. That figure describes the group’s operations. The activity it measures continues after the construction crews leave.

A completed building begins another working life. Occupiers need usable premises, and the property needs maintaining. This part of the business gets fewer ceremonial photographs. It also makes the family’s combination of construction and property ownership easier to understand.

The group also operates an energy business with a model built around installing and maintaining solar systems. Businesses and homeowners pay for the energy they use. It adds another continuing service to the property story: equipment goes in, then someone remains responsible for keeping it working. The relationship extends beyond the sale or installation. For a group already involved in buildings and their operation, that is a recognisable kind of responsibility.

A new address in Mimico

On August 25, 2026, TJ and Ernie attended the groundbreaking for Mimico Commons, a project developed with Fengate for the LiUNA Pension Fund of Central and Eastern Canada. The announced plans call for 271 rental homes in a ten-storey building, with ground-floor retail, near Mimico GO Station. First residents are expected in mid-2029.

It gives the current chapter a specific address and a future date. For a property developer, those two things carry much of the story: a place where work has begun, and a point at which other people are expected to begin using it.

Rinomato’s career now includes family companies, fellow drivers and film collaborators. The list can look scattered until the projects come into view. A car reaches a grid. A film reaches a premiere. A building moves towards occupancy. Each result involves people whose work the person at the centre depends upon.

The rookie title remains the most arresting detail. It arrived decades into his working life and made him a beginner again. In a biography full of buildings, it is the moment he stepped into a car that leaves the clearest impression: an experienced executive, learning another job.